Fraud in Nayib Bukele’s El Salvador Security Policy
By Andres Kogan Valderrama
HAVANA TIMES – Who could doubt that we are at a critical moment in Latin America and the Caribbean regarding the increase in organized crime and large criminal gangs? Countries are becoming increasingly vulnerable, either due to internal corruption or their inability to provide a precise and democratic response, within a context that has millions of people terrified in the region and demands urgent political solutions.
Hence, the name of Nayib Bukele is the most mentioned by major media outlets and right-wing sectors. He presents himself as the great savior to the security problems of the region, after reviewing the figures from El Salvador, which show a systematic decrease in homicide rates, making it today the country with the lowest figures in Latin America and the Caribbean.
This is how the idea of the Bukele model is repeated over and over again until exhaustion, and the possibility of applying it in the rest of the countries in the region is mentioned. It’s as if the current president of El Salvador has invented a magic wand to bring peace to the citizens, and all it would take is to replicate his crime-fighting policies and follow his manual step by step.
However, the problem with that is that Bukele’s surprising decrease in homicides has no relation to any type of preventive policy, strengthening of police intelligence, recovery of public spaces, strengthening of community organization, or improvement of the quality of life of Salvadorans. It is simply a brutal policy of detentions, imprisonment, and torture of anyone arbitrarily defined as a suspect.
His defenders may say that Bukele has dismantled the gangs, but at the cost of terrorizing the population and a systematic violation of human rights. Many of those imprisoned are unjustly deprived of their liberty, as various international organizations such as Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International have reported. They have provided enough evidence to debunk the supposed successful security model of El Salvador.
Likewise, it is well documented that this dismantling of the gangs is related to a corrupt pact between Bukele and these criminal organizations, which ended in 2022, leaving 87 people dead in 72 hours, under a state of exception, which claimed the lives of many people who had no relation with the gangs, being killed only because they were suspected.
On the other hand, while Bukele received a high vote in the recent elections, and the majority of Salvadorans may currently prefer to give up basic freedoms to walk more safely, it’s a double-edged sword. It is the beginning of a new dictatorship, where the corruption of its institutions and the concentration of power are undermining basic democratic standards, where gag laws and persecution of dissent are increasingly on the rise.
This is what the founder of the El Salvador news outlet El Faro, journalist Carlos Dada, has pointed out, stating how Bukele has dedicated himself to violating the constitution time and again to thus control the Legislative Assembly, the judiciary, and present himself indefinitely as a presidential candidate, in the autocratic style of Vladimir Putin, Daniel Ortega, and Nicolas Maduro.
But of course, the regional far-right doesn’t care that Bukele is building a dictatorship since he has become part of the conspiracy club, even going so far as to say that the UN’s Agenda 2030 and the role of George Soros are very suspicious, thus reproducing an anti-rights discourse. They also support specific discriminatory practices, such as the elimination of inclusive language in schools, joining the reactionary chorus against the so-called gender ideology.
Consequently, Bukele’s apparent positive numbers in security only conceal a fraud by a dictator who believes he can say and do whatever he wants in El Salvador, which deserves to have serious authorities, free from corruption, and that do not violate human rights in the name of a war against organized crime, which only worsens things and degrades us as people.